Relto

It's been a few years, but I found myself pulled back into Puzzle Pirates a weekend or two ago. A bit quieter than I remember (they've expanded out to new servers, and that leaves the original ocean a bit short), but it's just as fun. Perhaps a bit more so - since the population is down, it's almost easier to accomplish some things.
I'll have more to say about this once I finish shaking the rust off - amazing how much you forget in five years..

Yes, I'm a bad blogger. Feel free not to pay me this week.
Catching up on the automated spam that comes with any website, and hit the amusing idea of just approving all of them and seeing how many emails bounce (that's the big reason I have registration enabled; it would work even better if I was more reliable about checking!). A hundred undeliverables later, I'm quite happy with this plan. In the past I was manually checking each address (since many are obvious fakery), but this was much faster.

And hopefully I didn't mess anything up.

About to try updating this crate to Drupal 7. If you never see this place again, now you know why. :)

In the past few months, I've found myself interacting with a wider and wider circle of individuals. One contact leads me to another, who have three or four between them and I get pulled into their conversations... As a result, I have a circle of people in Tennessee, authors, workers at the Knoxville Childrens hospital, who I chat with on a regular basis. A few of these are hard core republicans, right wing, anti-socialist, anti-muslim, fundamentalist Christian... I could go on.

Part of the joy of home ownership, I've discovered, is shovelling. And I knew moving in I'd have a fair bit of it - corner lot + double-wide garage = lots of pavement to shovel.  What I didn't realize is that I'd need a lot of that space to store the *snow*.
We've had the second massive snowfall of the year, and the piles in the backyard are taller than my daughter. My double-wide garage is now officially single-wide for the remainder of the winter, sacrificed to become a Snow Storage Facility.

Had a couple days off, and while I did a bit of post-move tidying (y'know, finding homes for various stuff, particularly the geekery that was still squatting around my desk), I managed to start digging through my gaming backlog. And I might as well give you all a mini-review of the games as I go.

http://www.edmontonjournal.com/Edmonton+faces+tighter+restrictions/3742133/story.html
There were a few stories today that irked me, but this one takes the cake.

Yeah, it's one of *those* days.
First day back after vacation move (really, if you spend the whole two weeks doing chores, is it actually a "vacation"? Got a few things done at work, but mostly triaging all the requests that came in while I was gone. Can't deny that it's nice to get the "yay, you're back!" routine, though. First snowfall of the year didn't do much for my general mood, either.
House is 99.9% done - we're down to:

We are officially 100% in our new house. No pictures yet, since we dint have any computers up- that's tomorrow's task. Five hours of moving, two truck loads, and very understanding friends and family. We love you guys!

Sadly, now we have to unpack it all...